I don't think even supporters of abiogenesis claim to know how it works.

"In case anyone hasn't noticed it, the West is in extremis. The undertaker is checking his watch at the foot of its bed, and there's a sinister kettle of croaking, money-feathered vultures on the roof."

At 9/18/2014 11:37:11 AM, ChristianPunk wrote:In layman's terms, can somebody explain this? I am still on the bench when it comes to this and I don't understand it. Can anybody explain how it's scientific or true?

The transition from pure chemistry to life.

The problem comes when we define what 'life' is. Generally, for the purposes of abiogenesis 'life' is defined as a system by which natural selection can take place, which is very different to what we regard as 'life' today (which generally include systems such as peptide synthesis, lipid synthesis, metabolism, etc), many many orders of magnitude simpler (than even a halobacteria, arguably the simplest and most primitive organism that is extant today).

My debate with Jellon (my opening round) should give you a decent overview of what abiogenesis aims to accomplish:

At 9/18/2014 11:37:11 AM, ChristianPunk wrote:In layman's terms, can somebody explain this? I am still on the bench when it comes to this and I don't understand it. Can anybody explain how it's scientific or true?

Oh sorry, my previous post only tells you what abiogenesis is, the debate gives you some details of my own arguments for the truth of abiogenesis. There is no 'theory' of abiogenesis as it stands, since the science hasn't gotten that far yet. It's not clear it will ever get that far (to a 'theory' status) since we don't have a whole lot of evidence of the chemistry of the Early Earth, virtually every single chemical environment needs to be considered (surface chemistry, hydrothermal chemistry etc etc etc) so I personally don't think it's likely we are going to be able to point to a specific pathway and say "THAT'S how life occurred".

What we do have are numerous hypothesis of varying plausibility (RNA World, Lipid World, Metabolism-First, etc) which are accessible by what we do know about early Earth conditions, all of which are proposed to generate a self-replicating system by which NS can occur (the minimum requirement for life).

It could be the case that none of the main hypothesis are true and abiogenesis is still the case (e.g. we haven't ruled out even simpler systems to RNA World), since there are many ways to skin this cat, so to speak.

At 9/18/2014 11:37:11 AM, ChristianPunk wrote:In layman's terms, can somebody explain this? I am still on the bench when it comes to this and I don't understand it. Can anybody explain how it's scientific or true?

From a scientific point of view, which means looking at things from a purely materialistic stand point, we have the fact that life appears to have started on this planet about 3 billion years ago. Abiogenesis is the term given to theories which try to explain the mechanism by which this might have happened. As previous posts have pointed out this is very difficult and we are a long way from claiming to know for sure how this happened. It is easy to explain the start of life in non-materialistic terms if you are a theist. Most scientists do not accept theistic ideas.

Let's hope "the truth is out there" cos there is bugger all round here.

At 9/18/2014 11:37:11 AM, ChristianPunk wrote:In layman's terms, can somebody explain this? I am still on the bench when it comes to this and I don't understand it. Can anybody explain how it's scientific or true?

A long time ago a bolt of lightning hit a rock in a chemical swamp. Now there is life.

At 9/18/2014 11:37:11 AM, ChristianPunk wrote:In layman's terms, can somebody explain this? I am still on the bench when it comes to this and I don't understand it. Can anybody explain how it's scientific or true?

Envisage has the best answer so far. Better than what I can offer.

It is the transition from the state of pure chemicals, undergoing transition(s) to life. I debated bornofgod on the subject (which he decided not to really debate the subject), and there you can see how an RNA world might have happened.

At 9/18/2014 11:37:11 AM, ChristianPunk wrote:In layman's terms, can somebody explain this? I am still on the bench when it comes to this and I don't understand it. Can anybody explain how it's scientific or true?

Envisage has the best answer so far. Better than what I can offer.

It is the transition from the state of pure chemicals, undergoing transition(s) to life. I debated bornofgod on the subject (which he decided not to really debate the subject), and there you can see how an RNA world might have happened.

I plan on watching a documentary about it on PBS where Neil is explaining it. Neil Degrassee Tyson always makes things seem interesting as well as sound cool. Before I do, one last question. Are there any experiments or anything that I can look up where abiogenesis was proven?

At 9/18/2014 11:37:11 AM, ChristianPunk wrote:In layman's terms, can somebody explain this? I am still on the bench when it comes to this and I don't understand it. Can anybody explain how it's scientific or true?

Envisage has the best answer so far. Better than what I can offer.

It is the transition from the state of pure chemicals, undergoing transition(s) to life. I debated bornofgod on the subject (which he decided not to really debate the subject), and there you can see how an RNA world might have happened.

I plan on watching a documentary about it on PBS where Neil is explaining it. Neil Degrassee Tyson always makes things seem interesting as well as sound cool. Before I do, one last question. Are there any experiments or anything that I can look up where abiogenesis was proven?

No. It is not a complete theory at this moment, it is only probable. There are many experiments that show parts of abiogenesis is possible, but none (yet) that show the entire process.

At 9/18/2014 11:37:11 AM, ChristianPunk wrote:In layman's terms, can somebody explain this? I am still on the bench when it comes to this and I don't understand it. Can anybody explain how it's scientific or true?

Envisage has the best answer so far. Better than what I can offer.

It is the transition from the state of pure chemicals, undergoing transition(s) to life. I debated bornofgod on the subject (which he decided not to really debate the subject), and there you can see how an RNA world might have happened.

I plan on watching a documentary about it on PBS where Neil is explaining it. Neil Degrassee Tyson always makes things seem interesting as well as sound cool. Before I do, one last question. Are there any experiments or anything that I can look up where abiogenesis was proven?

No. It is not a complete theory at this moment, it is only probable. There are many experiments that show parts of abiogenesis is possible, but none (yet) that show the entire process.

I doubt that abiogenesis is ever going to show the entire process as much as evolution is going to show family-sized morphological changes in observable timescales. Abiogenesis like evolution is a process, where the system explores low entropic pathways to increasing the overall entropy. There are plateaus and deltas, where the system reaches different thresholds, but reaching all these thresholds requires time.

It's not a simple case if having the right conditions and out pops life. It's more of a case that conditions X leads to mixture of chemicals X, changes in the environment leads to system Y, time leads to system Y becoming system z etc.

If you take RNA World, you have the abiotic synthesis of nucleotides, which takes time, and perhaps the development of an established abiotic metabolism system first (to generate ribose), then you have the concentration of the nucleotide mix, polymerisation, which takes time and leads to a lot of intermediate catalytic cycles, and eventually encapsulation (which requires fatty acids to form over time) then a sustained system which evolves via natural selection to some self-sustaining state (with metabolism and some pseudo protein synthesis etc).

At 9/18/2014 11:37:11 AM, ChristianPunk wrote:In layman's terms, can somebody explain this? I am still on the bench when it comes to this and I don't understand it. Can anybody explain how it's scientific or true?

Envisage has the best answer so far. Better than what I can offer.

It is the transition from the state of pure chemicals, undergoing transition(s) to life. I debated bornofgod on the subject (which he decided not to really debate the subject), and there you can see how an RNA world might have happened.

I plan on watching a documentary about it on PBS where Neil is explaining it. Neil Degrassee Tyson always makes things seem interesting as well as sound cool. Before I do, one last question. Are there any experiments or anything that I can look up where abiogenesis was proven?

No. It is not a complete theory at this moment, it is only probable. There are many experiments that show parts of abiogenesis is possible, but none (yet) that show the entire process.

I doubt that abiogenesis is ever going to show the entire process as much as evolution is going to show family-sized morphological changes in observable timescales. Abiogenesis like evolution is a process, where the system explores low entropic pathways to increasing the overall entropy. There are plateaus and deltas, where the system reaches different thresholds, but reaching all these thresholds requires time.

It's not a simple case if having the right conditions and out pops life. It's more of a case that conditions X leads to mixture of chemicals X, changes in the environment leads to system Y, time leads to system Y becoming system z etc.

If you take RNA World, you have the abiotic synthesis of nucleotides, which takes time, and perhaps the development of an established abiotic metabolism system first (to generate ribose), then you have the concentration of the nucleotide mix, polymerisation, which takes time and leads to a lot of intermediate catalytic cycles, and eventually encapsulation (which requires fatty acids to form over time) then a sustained system which evolves via natural selection to some self-sustaining state (with metabolism and some pseudo protein synthesis etc).

At 9/18/2014 11:37:11 AM, ChristianPunk wrote:In layman's terms, can somebody explain this? I am still on the bench when it comes to this and I don't understand it. Can anybody explain how it's scientific or true?

The transition from pure chemistry to life.

The problem comes when we define what 'life' is. Generally, for the purposes of abiogenesis 'life' is defined as a system by which natural selection can take place, which is very different to what we regard as 'life' today (which generally include systems such as peptide synthesis, lipid synthesis, metabolism, etc), many many orders of magnitude simpler (than even a halobacteria, arguably the simplest and most primitive organism that is extant today).

My debate with Jellon (my opening round) should give you a decent overview of what abiogenesis aims to accomplish:

At 9/18/2014 11:37:11 AM, ChristianPunk wrote:In layman's terms, can somebody explain this? I am still on the bench when it comes to this and I don't understand it. Can anybody explain how it's scientific or true?

The transition from pure chemistry to life.

The problem comes when we define what 'life' is. Generally, for the purposes of abiogenesis 'life' is defined as a system by which natural selection can take place, which is very different to what we regard as 'life' today (which generally include systems such as peptide synthesis, lipid synthesis, metabolism, etc), many many orders of magnitude simpler (than even a halobacteria, arguably the simplest and most primitive organism that is extant today).

My debate with Jellon (my opening round) should give you a decent overview of what abiogenesis aims to accomplish:

At 9/18/2014 11:37:11 AM, ChristianPunk wrote:In layman's terms, can somebody explain this? I am still on the bench when it comes to this and I don't understand it. Can anybody explain how it's scientific or true?

At 9/18/2014 11:37:11 AM, ChristianPunk wrote:In layman's terms, can somebody explain this? I am still on the bench when it comes to this and I don't understand it. Can anybody explain how it's scientific or true?

I take issue with that debate because it focuses entirely on RNA World hypothesis, which is by no means the best possible hypothesis. And it was presented in a way in which it ignores why It would occur in the first place...

At 9/18/2014 11:37:11 AM, ChristianPunk wrote:In layman's terms, can somebody explain this? I am still on the bench when it comes to this and I don't understand it. Can anybody explain how it's scientific or true?